When Candy Script was officially released and in the hands of a few designers, I was in the middle of a three-week trip in North America. After returning to Buenos Aires, I found a few reactions to the font in my inbox. Alongside the congratulatory notes, flattering samples of the face in use, and the inevitable three or four “How do I use it?” emails, one interesting note asked me to consider an italic counterpart. 

I had experimented with a few different angles during the initial brainstorming of the concept but never really thought of Candy Script as an upright italic character set. A few trials confirmed to me that an italic Candy Script would be a bad idea. However, some of these trials showed conceptual promise of their own, so I decided to pursue them and see where they would go. Initially, it seemed a few changes to the Candy Script forms would work well at angles ranging from 18 to 24 degrees, but as the typeface evolved, I realized all the forms had to be modified considerably for a typeface of this style to work as both a digital font and a true emulation of real hand-lettering. Those were the pre-birth contractions of the idea for this font. I called it Sugar Pie because it has a sweet taste similar to Candy Script, mostly due to its round-to-sharp terminal concept. This in turn echoes the concept of the clean brush scripts found in the different film type processes of late 1960s and early 1970s.
 
While Candy Script’s main visual appeal counts on the loops, swashes, and stroke extensions working within a concept of casual form variation, Sugar Pie is artistically a straightforward packaging typeface. Its many ligatures and alternates are just as visually effective as Candy Script’s but in a subtler and less pronounced fashion. The alternates and ligatures in Sugar Pie offer many nice variations on the main character set. Use them to achieve the right degree of softness you desire for your design. Take a look of the How to use PDF file in our gallery section for inspiration.

Oktah Neue is an extended version of a more limited Oktah family. Since its release in 2019, Oktah Neue received two major updates, the most recent in June 2022. The latest version of Oktah Neue is comes in 22 styles as well as one variable font. Oktah Neue inherits the best traits of Oktah—great legibility, simple geometric letters shapes, low contrast across all styles—but also introduces what Oktah fell short of: extensive language support and enhanced OpenType features. While working on Oktah Neue, we strove to create a neutral typeface that would be a workhorse for designers, typographers and other font users alike. Building onto the familiar shapes of Oktah, we tried to make them more neutral, at the same time preserving the unique character of the typeface. Certain characters remained the same, others have undergone a complete transformation, which left them better tailored for the wide implementation range of Oktah Neue. Over the past years the size of the character set in Oktah Neue was significantly expanded (currently standing at 2500+ characters). In addition to Extended Latin, new language systems (Extended Cyrillic, Greek — both Basic and Polytonic — and Hebrew) were introduced. The already vast Cyrillic set also includes localised forms for such languages as Bulgarian, Serbian and many others. Oktah Neue is OpenType friendly: it knows how to do alternatives, contextual alternatives, switch various between stylistic sets and adjust the height of punctuation and symbols as you type. Small Caps include all listed languages as well as numerals and symbols. Oktah Neue comes equipped with various styles of numerals — from standard Proportional Lining figures to Oldstyle, Tabular Oldstyle. Sub- and Superscript, Fractions and two sets of circled numbers. Oktah Neue is well-kerned with more than 3000 kerning pairs and automatically hinted. Oktah Neue comes in 22 styles (11 uprights and 11 italics), two of which — Ultra Light and Black Italic — can be downloaded free of charge to get a firsthand experience of what Oktah Neue is ready to offer. The latest update of Oktah Neue introduced a fully variable option: now, both axes (Slant and Weight) can be accessed in the same file for utmost convenience.